Omar Mateen’s motive for the Orlando carnage aren’t “complicated” or “unknowable” at all. He wanted the US to quit bombing Afghanistan. The US took the war against terrorism to the terrorists in Afghanistan. Mateen took the war against that intervention to the interventionists in the US. From James Bradley at antiwar.com:
America doesn’t understand Orlando shooter Omar Mateen’s motive. The New York Times speculated that Omar was probably radicalized over the Internet, that he was anti-gay or perhaps a frustrated self-hating gay, finally concluding that we might never know. Many American media outlets reported that Omar was motivated by ISIS propaganda and that he was infected by the virus of radical Islam.
Omar was born in the U.S. and never traveled to the birthplace of his parents, Afghanistan, which he called “my country.” I remember Afghanistan in 1975 as a 20-year-old hitchhiking across Asia with my 19-year-old girlfriend. We roamed that beautiful country, interacting with friendly Afghans. At the time hardly anyone was concerned about “radical Islam.”
Soon afterwards the Soviet empire moved into Afghanistan and attempted to conquer it. When the indomitable Afghans refused to submit, the Soviet empire soon collapsed.
In 2001 the American empire moved in and, according to Brown University’s Watson Institute, almost 100,000 Afghani civilians have been killed, mostly by US bombs.
Being bombed is very emotional to those on the receiving end. As humans under attack, you’re naturally motivated to retaliate. When I ventured across Vietnam and Laos, survivors of US bombing raids told me of their fellow villagers who, back in the 1960’s, did not know anything about a country named America or the war beyond their hills. But these illiterate peasants were instantly radicalized and committed to patriot resistance upon their very first sighting of US warplanes dropping bombs on their homes and families.
Look what happened in the wake of the 9-11 attack upon the World Trade Center: thousands of American men and women were radicalized – moved by murder from the air – after viewing images of their homeland under attack. We Americans honor their reaction as “patriotism.”
Americans will always remember 9-11, but curiously, we don’t expect other people to react in a similar, visceral, patriotic way when their homelands are bombed. President Richard Nixon discovered how to make war more palatable to American voters. When he took office in the midst of the quagmire of the Vietnam War, Nixon did something unprecedented in the history of war: he upped the killing of Indochinese, but accomplished the feat with fewer US casualties. As the president withdrew US ground troops from Vietnam, he dramatically increased the ferocity of the air war. As Nixon slaughtered many more people than his predecessor President Lyndon Johnson, the removal of American boots shifted the Vietnam War from the front to the back of the American mind.
Maybe we Americans have difficulty understanding the immediate and extreme reactions that dropping US bombs creates because our homeland has never been carpet-bombed. And what American newspaper publishes photos of the dead Muslims killed by Obama? If you Google “Muslim bombing” with the name of your favorite newspaper or news website, the results will show only Muslims’ reactions in the US. The hundreds of thousands of Muslims the US kills don’t register. So we don’t see the truth. Is it ignorance, or – as Nixon discovered – that the American people don’t mind others, foreigners, being killed, just so American boys are not dying in great numbers on the ground?
Instead of facing Omar’s true motive, we debate semantics. It’s as if we expect that after the left-wing or the right-wing identifies the correct way to depict the menacing mental virus, our national security state will root out the sickness.
To continue reading: Omar Mateen’s Motive
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